Stećci (singular: Stećak), are monumental medieval tombstones that lie scattered across the landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are the country’s most legendary symbol. These are the tombstones of those who lived between the 11th and 15th centuries and refused to swear allegiance to any kingdom but their own or to be swayed by any influence. Instead they stayed true to themselves and to what they could find only within themselves and in Bosnia.

Their most remarkable feature is their decorative motifs, many of which remain enigmatic to this day. These motifs depict knights in armor, hunters hunting, farmers in the fields, warriors competing in tournaments, rearing horses, dancers, ladies in dresses, flowers, wolves, bears, wild boars and dogs. Among favored ornaments were the crescent moon, stars, cross and swastika. The images celebrate life, joy, physical strength, and merriment. Questioning of death and oblivion appears in some of the inscriptions but is absent in the carved images. They are around 80 primary and 320 secondary motifs found on about 7 500 Stećci.

These stone slabs are sometimes as heavy as 30,000 kilograms and vary in shape. Sometimes they take the shape of a roofed sarcophagus, sometimes of a high pillar, an ordinary flat slab, a chest in the shape of a elongated cube with flat surfaces, or simply an irregular roughly hewn monolith. On average they are two meters long and one meter wide. The slates are between 30 and 50 centimeters high and the sarcophagi and tombs are approximately 1.5 meters in height. The height of the pillars ranges from two to three meters.

Stećci are gruped in what is known as Nekropola which is a graveyard, and almost all of the Nekropola (graveyards) are located on hills overlooking the surrounding country-side where those who truly loved this country with their hearts and souls trace their roots.

Location of Stećci on the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina and surrounding area that use to be part of the Kingdom of Bosnia

Today there are about 69 356 known Stećci in existence found at 3162 locations, among all recorded Stećci, relief motifs were found on fewer than 6,000 and the inscriptions on fewer than 400. Most of the Stećci are located with in the borders of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina, however they can also be found in the places where people of Bosnia an Herzegovina settled or with in the borders where Kingdom of Bosnia extended to. To put this in to perspective the number of Stećci found in Bosnia and Herzegovina is 59 593 or 85.92%, followed by parts of Croatia mainly in Dalmatia (part of the Bosnian Kingdom in past) 4 447 or 6.41%, Montenegro 3 049 or 4.4% and Serbia 2 267 or 3.27%.

One interesting thing about the Stecci tombstones, is that they are almost exclusively found in high altitude, you rarely find them in some field be it beyond Bosnia proper or within it. This has lead to the hypothesis that they were a typical trait which the indigenous population developed (in contrast to new slavic elements which wouldve been more concentrated in lower lands). Add to this that medieval Bosnia was in many ways a rather complex state, in its very administration. The Bosnian Church, the regional representatives, the Djed, the King/Queen which could and was at times dethroned (unlike many other states of the time where the royalty had absolute power, this was not the case in Bosnia, as they were subject to the Stanak and there is no doubt that there was from time to time separate interests within Bosnia. The dethroning of Ban Kulin's son is one example, another one is the state literally splitting up in two as the Ottomans were occupying it).

Their origin can be discussed, but they retained some of the most archaic European elements that can be found. Whether they were derived from Roman influence, or indigenous, or a mixture thereof is unclear (altough, the local people did not admix with the Roman's to any substantial degree, this can be easily proven today (by way of Phylogenetic study), so any Roman influence was if so simply adopted from Romans stationed there, and was not a result of mixture of populations).

Nevertheless here is a good example showing the influence of people before them, with an old swaztika symbol, as can also be found on antique remnaints from Roman times (can be seen in the Bosnian national museum, found near Zenica) from 1066, from Crepaljsko. I do not know what it meant to them, and whether a sun symbol was part of their own culture or something adopted from Romans.

Quote:

A se lezi Toloje.

Ne prevrni mi ovi kam, ne prekidaj mi ovi san.

Mozda mi se sada zdesi ono sto zeljeh da mi se zdesi u zivotu.

1066. kad vepr bjese gospodar v sumi, a ja ...

In all likelyhood there was some pre-slavic influence to using these Stecci, and it seems it was passed on to all people which had factors of their derivation (that is of the indigenous people of the area), were they at that time Catholics, followers of the Bosnian Church and its influences, or Orthodox. Altough it is obvious that by and large most examples lie in what was the very centre of the influence of the Bosnian Church, and also some of the most prominent pre-slavic tribes as far as how long they preserved their traits. Whether these two in combination have something to do with it, that is the pre-slavic elements making up a large factor there, and the Bosnian Church being there, or whether the combination itself is just a coincidence (as far as the Stecci goes, it may not be a coincidence in the development of the Bosnian Church itself), is not something I feel like speculating about.

It cannot be forgotten that some of them lie a bit out of what was never in the proper influence of the medieval Bosnian Church or in cases even the state itself. Nevertheless they hold traces from the ancestry which is a factor, in varying degrees, in the formation of the contemporary three groups in Bosnia, and the neighbouring nations. And it is interesting to find out just how this pertains to their earlier life, and how much it was influenced by others.

Here is a map from a an external (Serbian (I think Okrojsha here at SSC posted it once) it is from when Serbia was at its geographicly largest) source, also showing details about Bosnia of that time:

Moštre's university, founded in 1175 was one of the first in Europe, and was known for its scholarship in medicine, theology, cosmogeny [Addition: Or cosmology] and ethics, although because of its connection to the Bosnian Church, nothing remains of its archives. Its existence is documented only by a handful of references in the Vatican archives...

Stecak are the tombstones, pictured above, created during the Medieval Age by followers of the Bosnian Church. The Bosnian Muslim people trace their heritage back to the Bosnian Church, a heretical form of Catholicism sometimes acknowledged as the first Protestant Church in the world.

Mak Dizdar is one of the most noted Bosnian writers of his time. This is his study of some of the inscriptions on Stecak tombstones that inspired him.

In the epitaph of Bogčin, son of Stipko Ugrinović, engraved on a stećak in Kotorac near Sarajevo, the horrible destiny of the youthful deceased is described with wonderful simplicity:
Young I departed from this world
And I hath been my mother’s only

Immeasurable is the sorrow ofa prisoner rotting in the mold and darkness of the Blagay prison, built under the walls of the court of the princes of Hum, on top of the hill of Hum, under which is the source of the wild, dark, blue river Buna. On one of its stones, the captive engraved, perhaps with his own nails, his sorrowful and silenced scream:
And this wrote Vrsan Kosarić
A slave who has no joy

Life is a miracle, and death is a puzzle that should be encountered as a mystery that clutches us inescapably. That is why the motif of death, as inevitability, is eternalized most frequently in stone. Worldly life has a gloom and a darkness; it becomes an absurdity to be escaped as soon as possible because it is the product of the principle of evil.

An anonymous inscription from Gorica marked his grave in hope of a new, more shining life.

The burial scaffold I marked in darkness
And left it wisely
For the new times

Ivan Maršić from western Hum, in simple words and without irony, records a bitter truth about human fate that he arrived at the end of his life, seeing it as a most precious experience and passing it on to posterity:
Long I lived on earth
Eighty and eight years.
And I hath not taken anything with me!

One inhabitant of Lašva, in the vicinity of Travnik, said the same, only in an even quieter and deeper style:

And here lies Dragaj
At the end –
Nothing…

Radojica Bilić from the village of Staro, near Jajce, not without vanity, erected his grave stone in his lifetime, but his words about death carry a sincere suffering for the transient world and the sorrow others should be made aware of.

I beg
Brothers
And aunts
And sisters-in-law
Come forward
And mourn me…
For you will be
As I am
And I shall not be
As you are!

An unidentified sufferer from Goražde on the Drina river mourns the wonders of this world, where man is only a temporary resident, foreigner, and traveler who learned that he traveled the roads under mysterious skies so that he could only, at the end of that short and dreamlike journey, grieve sincerely:

It is strange -
To long for this world…

The remote and deep––almost outside of time and space––sigh of Stipko Radosalić, who lived at the end of the fourteenth century in Premilovo Polje, reaches us from the darkness of the centuries and on through into future that is dug out for us as well hereafter, shaking all our senses and digging through all speculations of our mind:
God, so long ago I lay down
And I am to lie for mighty long…

No one is spared the experience and the bitterness of the death hour, neither poor nor mighty. On the gravestone of Prince Tvrdisav Brsnić from Bujakovina stand engraved the words of simple truth and inevitable justice:

Honorable knight
Arrived here destitute…

A mild sorrow pervades an inscription from Svitava:

I was born
Into great joy,
And I departed
Into great sorrow.

Not only irony, but also sarcasm can be found on the stećak of Juraj Ivanović from the middle course of the Neretva:
Herein is written, on the cross of Juraj:

For all men to know
How I gained wealth
And how I died
For it.

The thought recorded on the stećak of Radosav Mrkšić is so severe that no gravestone can carry it without some blasphemy. It is the condemnation of death sent by somebody who embodies injustice, from a power that could only be an evil, dark, merciless god, and because of whom the following words may be sarcastically uttered:
I stood
Praying to God,
With no evil thought-
And the thunder killed me!

Sometimes, death also comes at the right time, as a consequence or reward, as redemption for somebody’s unjust act. Murder does not suit a just man; one is allowed to fight only in a just war, that is, the war against war, against evil. In self-defense, Dabiživ Drašković was punished at the moment he decided to participate in the spilling of blood, in which he should not have found himself.
When I wanted to kill
That is when I died…

Life is entangled with thousands of traps and mysteries, and it is not easy to distinguish right from wrong. This makes the responsibility of judgment even greater and more difficult. If God, the highest judge, can err in judging the sins committed by human souls, then humans, worldly judges, are even more inclined to err when judging the gravity of an offence and determining crime and punishment. Therefore the role of worldly judges is more delicate. The mundane power is short-lived and temporary, and we shall all settle our accounts at the great court after our death. On the judicial stone chair in Hodovo, the ancient wisdom about this theme, that is, courts and judges, is expressed:

Look
At this stone –
To whom it belonged?
To whom it now belongs?
To whomever will it ever belong?